


This Song and Dance, It's Muscle Memory by Now

by telm_393



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Dark, Gen, Memory Loss, Mental Health Issues, No Apocalypse (Umbrella Academy), Non-Linear Narrative, Psychosis, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-12-07 19:21:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18239171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: Five wakes up with the apocalypse on his mind. His mind is, incidentally, the only place the apocalypse has ever been.





	This Song and Dance, It's Muscle Memory by Now

**Author's Note:**

> This is post-canon for an alternate season one that is made up entirely of noodle incidents and didn't actually involve an apocalypse, just an estranged, superpowered family brought back together by the death of their dad and the return of their brother who disappeared a long-ass time ago.
> 
> Also I personally think that this is one of the sadder things I've written.
> 
> (Also also, this fic is Luther friendly.)

Five wakes up with the apocalypse on his mind and his mind already in overdrive.

There are four days left until the end of the world. He can feel the countdown in his brain. He looks out of the window of his room—his old room, a child’s room—and sees that it’s already light out. He kicks himself internally for wasting time; he knows he doesn’t have time to waste. There is an urgency licking at his mind like fire and agitation thrumming in his veins.

He can hear sounds coming from downstairs. Clattering, chattering, laughter. He hears Vanya, Luther, Diego…

They sound very happy for people who know that the world itself is a ticking bomb that they have yet to defuse. Five knows he told them about the apocalypse. He remembers it clearly. He told Vanya, though he knows she didn’t quite believe him and eventually he let her not quite believe him, and then he told Klaus and Luther as he sat in front of MeriTech waiting for the moment that he could finally speak to someone about the serial number on the glass eye.

He wasn’t able to bring the eye with him, it slipped through his fingers as things so often did in the apocalypse, but he remembered the serial number as though it was carved into his skin, and that was enough. He told Diego, and Luther again, after the incident at the library, and they understood, and today...

Today was when he was supposed to go return the briefcase to Hazel and Cha-Cha. The fake briefcase, of course. Or he already did that, and then he met with the Handler, and there was an explosion, there was screaming, he turned back time and turned back time, he thinks he's done that a lot...

Five closes his eyes tightly, rubs at his temples. The clutter in his mind won’t let him be. It wasn’t like this before. Before, he never lost track of time. He doesn’t know if he’s losing track of time.

Someone laughs downstairs, and Five faintly recalls sitting on the counter as mom and Diego prepared a meal, drinking coffee at the kitchen table as Klaus and Ben chatted, writing equations in a notebook as Allison spoke to her daughter in a raspy voice, listening to Vanya yell about a man who was destroying the world as the doors shook, telling his siblings that there wasn’t time for their nonsense, the apocalypse was coming...

Five recalls waiting for a very long time, year after year passing him by.

There are four days until the apocalypse. Five is missing something.

“Get up and go look at the wall,” Delores says, and Five turns to look at her, but she’s not there. She hasn’t been around in body lately, he reminds himself. Hasn’t been around in body since he got back.

Since he got back. A while ago.

Five gets to his feet. His legs feel numb.

The walls are painted with chalkboard paint, he notes. They weren’t like that before, and he wonders when they found the time to change them. They are covered with equations, all of them in his handwriting.

(With a burst of blue, he steps through the fabric of time and watches Einstein teach, standing next to him as he speaks. When he tries to touch the chalkboard, his hand goes right through, and when he blinks he is back in the in-between place, pacing like a caged animal as he watches the timeline warp around him, searching for 2019 with sharp eyes. He has seen a newspaper with a headline about his father's death, seen his siblings standing outside in the rain, seen Klaus in an ambulance watching the world end on television, or a world end, the world...

Five has seen the end of the world. The moon breaks into pieces and the sun eats up the earth and ashes fall all around. He saw it before anything else, when he stepped into the in-between place and could not step out. The end of everything, millennia away, fire everywhere, and then his eye caught on the ruins of a city long, long ago, put it all together and that’s where he lived, mostly, until he was able to blink away for the first time in ages, until his equations worked and the Handler came to visit, the first person he’d interacted with since Delores in what felt like forever.

With the Commission’s aid he stepped into the timestream and killed like it was nothing at all, working to get home.

Time went by and by and by, molding his brain into something that saw everything at least once, and finally he saw the timestream with clarity, finally his powers worked again and he stood next to the earth and watched the past go by slow enough that he could pinpoint the place where his siblings were, the place where the world—the world they knew, the life they knew—began to end.

He warped through the blue veins of the universe and landed hard on the ground, part of the earth again, and as he fell through the fabric once and for all he heard a gun cock and Kennedy die and his mind warped again and thought, wouldn’t it be something if the Handler weren’t just a product of your imagination, wouldn’t it be something if you’d ever shot a gun, wouldn’t it be something if the end of the world went like _this_...)

Some of the equations on the walls are smeared beyond recognition. There are spots that are clear, all erased away. The apocalypse hasn’t happened yet, he can glean as much from the equations and the fire in his mind, but it’s not in four days either. He knows that because when he faces the far wall he sees a huge pad of paper hanging there, and it says **AUGUST 17, 2019.**

A memory flickers through his mind, a bit clearer than the other ones that are replaying over and over again so faintly that he tries not to pay attention to them because they're not his anyway.

He’s sitting at the dinner table with the pad near him. He’s busy writing in one of his notebooks, so he’s not paying much attention to Allison, who is the one writing out the words he's seeing right now on the pad in bright blue marker.

**REMEMBER!**

  * TAKE YOUR VITAMINS. THE PILLS ARE ON YOUR BEDSIDE TABLE.
  * DRINK WATER.
  * EAT. Come downstairs if you can, otherwise someone will bring you some food.
  * Klaus’s boyfriend Dave stayed overnight, so he’ll probably be around. 
  * You are with your siblings: Allison, Vanya, Luther, Klaus, and Diego. Ben is dead, but Klaus can see him. You have been home since March 24, 2019. 
  * There has not been an apocalypse, and there will never be one in our lifetime. 



The apocalypse _really_ hasn’t come yet, then, even as the months have gone past. Five walks over to his bedside table. There’s a glass of water and there are pills, and before he can think he swallows them down because when he sees them he knows he’s taken them before and they’ve never killed him and either they help him or do nothing at all, that’s how vitamins are.

Five drinks the rest of the water, and then he sits down on his bed and doesn’t really do anything. He has a headache, but it doesn’t hurt, it just pounds against his skull, all the things he’s seen, all the things he knows. One day the universe will die, this is a fact. Five saw it. The question is when, that’s...

There’s still clattering downstairs in the dining room. Laughter. There were never really sounds from the dining room before, years and years ago when he was thirteen and not just stuck in this body. The notes said to eat. _Come down if you can._  He thinks that there are days that he’s eaten up here. Days he's refused to come down. Days he's refused to eat anything. He thinks.

He stands up. The apocalypse is coming in four days, but he supposes it’s been coming in four days before and it clearly didn't, so maybe it won’t this time either, and he’s hungry, and the sounds he hears downstairs only might be real.

Five doesn’t change his clothes, the blue t-shirt and black sweatpants he woke up in, because it doesn’t seem important. Feeling a little clumsier than he’d like, Five walks downstairs. Everything feels foreign to him, but his muscle memory allows him to go into the dining room, recognize his siblings, and take a seat at the table.

His siblings—he takes stock: Diego, Luther, Allison, Vanya—stop talking and laughing. Unless he’s imagining it, Five sees a wariness in their eyes, or maybe some kind of hope, or maybe both, or maybe nothing. Maybes, he remembers, define his life now. The memories from the timestream, his and not his, are starting to quiet down. His mind slows and so does his heartbeat. A welcome salve spreads over his cracked, bleeding brain. He wonders what was in the vitamins.

The pieces of his fractured self begin to slip into place, but they don’t cut him.

Five left a long time ago, and then he came back and the apocalypse didn’t happen. The apocalypse hasn’t happened yet. The note said it never would, but Five’s smarter than his siblings, and smart enough to know he can’t be sure.

Vanya smiles at him. “How do you feel?” she asks.

Five smiles back, a gentle quirk of his lips. He feels fine. “Do you think it’ll start making more sense one day?” he asks, and the edge of her smile twists into bittersweetness.

“Yeah, I do,” she tells him, and he doesn’t know whether she’s lying to him or herself or whether she’s lying at all, so he decides that she’s telling the truth, because at the very least he feels comfortable, at the very least he has been here before, on this earth, in this house, and he knows these people and they are alive, and the apocalypse hasn’t happened yet.

He nods and he goes back to his food, which is cereal that someone must have put down in front of him at some point, though he's not sure when, frowning when he notices the ashes that have started falling into the bowl. He blinks, and they’re gone. Maybe they were never there at all.

(“I think you’re right,” he tells his siblings in a moment of terrified lucidity, some hours after his second dose of medication. “I think I made it up. I got confused. Dad said time travel could contaminate the mind, didn’t he? Tell me he said that, tell me I’m remembering at least that correctly.”

“He did!” Luther says desperately. “He did, we all remember. Five, it’s good that you figured it out, it’s a step forward...”

Five runs his hands through his hair. His eyes burn, his chest heaves, and he remembers with as much clarity as he can what it was like in the place between time and space. It was oddly beautiful, like living in a blue-tinted prism somewhere between nothing and forever. “I made it all up,” he whispers. “Everything merged and warped, it was so easy to get confused.” He wonders if he made the apocalypse and the Commission up while he was in the in-between place or whether they sprang from his mind fully formed as he finally managed to time travel out and away forever.

“I know,” Luther says, his voice strained, and Five wonders how he possibly could.

Five looks at his siblings, at their tired, worried faces, and he snaps, “Don’t look at me that way. I do everything for you. I have for a very long time.”

At least they look like they understand what he’s talking about, though they don’t stop looking sad.

“At least I know now,” Five says even as the world he really knows shatters around him, because that’s how the world works, it ends and ends and ends in a million ways every day, everyone living their own apocalypses all the time. There’s no way of stopping them.

“Yeah,” Luther replies with an eager nod. “At least you know.” He brightens a little and says, “Hey, maybe we can go out to the diner this time.”

Five's not sure what exactly Luther’s talking about, doesn’t remember any diner-type places other than Griddy’s with the bullet hole behind the cash register, but he just nods. He’s tired, but getting calmer. He’ll put it all together, and then he can start over.

As he walks out of the living room in search of shoes, he hears Klaus ask Diego in a wavering voice, “Bets on how long this’ll last before the apocalypse is back?”

Diego snaps, “Not fucking funny.”

Five feels a pit in his stomach.)

Klaus and a man Five only vaguely recognizes walk into the dining room looking like they just rolled out of bed. Klaus grins at Five, and the other man gives him a hesitant smile.

Klaus’s boyfriend Dave, the notes said, and with the fire in his mind receding Five recalls the week of the apocalypse that wasn’t, how frantic it was, Klaus disappearing for a day and coming back vowing to get sober _but_ also he needed money to pay off some dealers, oops, and then there was some rambling about this guy he’d met, this veteran, and Five thinks that those two things happened separately but mostly what he knows is that the stranger in his home is Dave and Dave isn't a stranger, and Five looks back down at his food. He feels like he hasn’t eaten in years.

“I think it’s going to be a good day,” he hears Vanya say.

Five eats a spoonful of cereal.

The apocalypse is on his mind.

**Author's Note:**

> Literally all of this is the fault of intearsaboutrobots, who is great but totally was the one who floated the idea of a story where the apocalypse was indeed completely all in Five's head.


End file.
